WHEN WRITING CHANGED THE BRAIN

Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. These two philosophers bridged the change in brain function that coincided with Greek literacy.

In the introduction to this series, I suggested that speech, writing, printing and coding each qualitatively changed how brains work.  I also said we would not necessarily  look at them in chronological order, so I will start with the book that started me thinking about brain changes caused by those inventions.

 Julian Jaynes was a curious, controversial figure who earned his bachelor’s degree at McGill and started graduate school at the University of Toronto before spending three years in a federal penitentiary for refusing to join the military or participate in the conscientious objector program during World War II. After the war, he finished his doctoral studies at Yale but refused to submit his dissertation in a dispute with the faculty and administration. He spent the next  fifteen years in London acting and writing plays while taking occasional  adjunct teaching jobs. 

Jaynes eventually returned to Yale and then went to Princeton as an instructor and research associate. He never sought tenure and, although he was a popular instructor and guest lecturer, he stayed at the bottom of the academic ladder until he retired.  He lived a mostly solitary life plagued by alcohol abuse and died following a stroke at age 77.

Jaynes’s obsession with defining consciousness led to his only book—ponderously titled The  Origin of Consciousness in  the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind—in which he makes the case that the brain fundamentally changed when civilization became literate.  He based the argument on several ideas, some of which are widely accepted and many of which are not.

First, the two cerebral hemispheres do not do the same thing and are not equally important, especially in communication.  The left hemisphere almost always controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere the left.  More significantly, damage to specific areas in the left hemisphere lead to loss of the ability to understand and create speech and to read and write.  When humans became literate, the left side became vastly more important, and Jaynes believed that literacy made the left hemisphere dominant.  The right hemisphere seems to be more involved in visual-spatial relations and may have a role in some types of creativity, but one can lose that side of the brain and still communicate quite well.

Jaynes argues that something about how the brain processes input and is able to think about itself changed at about the time alphabetic writing was invented.  His ideas became controversial with the suggestion that, prior to literacy, people did not reason out their actions or make conscious decisions.  Instead, in a time when the two hemispheres were equally important, people heard and saw hallucinations from their right hemispheres that seemed entirely real and they obeyed the voices that came from their own brains. Pre-literate people believed the voices and visions were supernatural. They believed they were gods.

Jaynes thought ancient literature proved that hypothesis.  He argued that the earliest writing (other than cuneiform and hieroglyphics that were basically used for counting and cataloguing) were transcriptions of stories that had been passed down orally from the time before literacy.  Those stories, according to Jaynes, preserved the way pre-literate civilizations thought and hallucinated.

The Iliad is the oldest written document for which we have a translation accurate enough get a glimpse into the author’s mind.  It was likely written in the 8th century BCE and was taken from poems aoidoi (poets and bards) passed down after the fall of Mycenae four hundred years earlier.  That places the Iliad within just a few centuries of the first writing and makes Homer a window into the pre-literate brain. If that is true, what we see through the window is fascinating.

 Jaynes argues (with convincing examples) that the characters in the Iliad  never sat back and considered whether they should  eat, drink, make love, or fight.  A rational mind did not enter into the decision.  In fact, there is no word for mind anywhere in the Iliad.  The Greeks and Trojans simply did what the gods they lived with told them to do.  They followed an inner voice or thumos which Jaynes calls hallucinations. Pre-literate Greeks heard and saw gods that were entirely real to them, and they lived their lives obeying orders from those gods.  Without literacy, the left brain was not in control; the right brain, which generated the hallucinations, was equally influential.

 By the 6th century BCE, the Greeks had an  alphabet and were largely literate.  The thumos had been supplanted by the noos or conscious mind and the gods had left the room. Aristotle, Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras were exploring how nature worked without the gods being physically present.

The Iliad was not the only written document that seems to bridge the non-literate with the literate brain.  The Old Testament has examples of the same phenomenon. The Book of Amos, written about 760-750 BCE, is the oldest  of the Bible’s prophetic works.  It documents encounters between God and a shepherd for whom the Deity was clearly a physical reality.  By the  8th century BCE, most Hebrews had lost their incarnate God, but Amos and a few other prophets still heard and saw Him. 

Skip ahead to Ecclesiastes which comprises lessons from a philosopher (traditionally said to have been Solomon) that might have been written as late as the mid-2nd century BCE.  Although the book says a great deal about living a life acceptable to God, the Deity is no longer physically present.

Psalms is interesting.  It is a series of prayers composed over several centuries, many of which complain that God was longer present.  Psalm 22 is typical.  “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?  Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer . . .”  The angst of having lost a physically present God was not unique to the Hebrews.  The Assyrian Tukulti-Ninurta from approximately 1230 BCE is strikingly similar. “My god has forsaken me and disappeared.  My goddess failed and keeps at a distance.  The good angel who walked beside me has departed.”  By the beginning of the first millennium BCE, God or the gods had gone to the heavens.  By around 400 BCE, even the prophets no longer saw or heard them. All that remained were the sacred texts.

Jaynes argued that the loss of  the gods was really the loss of visual and auditory hallucinations when language, which largely resides in the left cerebral hemisphere, dominated and suppressed the images created in the right one.  The idea that brain function before and after literacy could be so different as to bring consciousness of the pre-literate into question was radical enough and hard enough to prove that Jaynes was largely dismissed. Nonetheless, there are tantalizing facts that make his hypothesis interesting.

It has been recognized for more than a hundred years that singing and rhythmic speech are sometimes preserved when the speech areas of the left hemisphere are abruptly destroyed.  In those cases, a different kind of speech originates in the non-dominant side.  One can temporarily put the dominant side of the brain to sleep with barbiturate injected into the left carotid artery.  Why one would do that is a topic for another day, but the result is the same as that seen in a stroke.  Speech is lost but singing and poetry are often preserved.  Even more interesting was an experiment in which positron emission tomograms were done on psychotic patients while they were actively hallucinating.  In those patients neurons in the non-dominant right temporal lobe had increased activity while the visions were happening.  The hallucinations seem to have been generated in the right brain. Ironically, the word paranoia come from the Greek para + nous—literally a mind beside one’s own.  A mind beside one’s own may live in the non-dominant hemisphere, although it rarely surfaces in a brain in which literacy has made the dominant side overwhelmingly important. Perhaps the surfacing was not always rare.

There is a great deal more written about the effect of literacy on brain function, most of which is less controversial than Jaynes.  Whether he was right or not, something about how brains work seems to have changed when civilizations became literate.  In episodes to come, we will come back to how writing evolved and at other ideas about the effect of literacy on the brain.

Reference: Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976.